Dusty ghosts haunt this retelling of a famous Sydney murder

A MODEL MURDER
Darlinghurst Courthouse, January 7
Until January 25
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Shirley Beiger escaped to the obscurity of Melbourne while the going was good; before Sydney suddenly wondered if it, and its judicial system, had been dazzled by her blonde curls into a “not guilty” verdict in her trial for murdering her lover, Arthur Griffith. Beiger, you see, was a glamorous model.

Sydney Festival’s artistic director, Olivia Ansell, suggested a play about these credulity-stretching 1954 events, Melanie Tait developed the story, and Sheridan Harbridge wrote and directed the script.

The play is performed in the same courtroom where Beiger stood trial in 1954.

Enraged by his affairs, Beiger killed Griffiths, a womanising bookie, outside Chequers nightclub with a shot from a rifle into his face at point-blank range. At issue was whether she pulled the trigger intentionally, or because he pushed her while she was holding the gun – which happened to be directed at his nose.

While the play interrogates our favouring of human beauty, our jury system and trial by media, the fact Beiger was not even convicted of manslaughter by the all-male jury is so bizarre that Harbridge chose to craft a zany comedy; musical hall meets sketch comedy, with the characters little more than puppets.

Was the judicial system dazzled by Beiger’s blonde curls into a “not guilty” verdict?Credit:

Sprinkling magic over it all is the fact that the show is performed in the same courtroom the real trial was held in 70 years ago. This makes it so full of faint echoes and dusty ghosts that one wonders if making the play such a broad comedy was the best solution.

Scope for ample humour would still have existed if the play had dug a little deeper than the jury – which took all of two hours to acquit Beiger of both murder and manslaughter. Instead, we come to know only a cardboard cut-out Beiger: someone who, in denying the prosecutor’s accusations, could waggle her curls and make innocence the only verdict.

Nonetheless, having opted to keep the story flimsy and zany, Harbridge makes some of it hilarious. When Ryan Morgan’s Detective Blissett takes the stand, for instance, his combination of laconicism and meticulousness in matters of measurement works brilliantly. Later, Morgan, now playing Arthur, joins with Blazey Best’s Gill, a Chequers showgirl, in singing Don’t Be So Reckless over and around the judge – who was, during this performance, NSW Governor (and former Court of Appeal president) Margaret Beazley, plucked from the audience and amiably playing along. Fedora-wearing audience members also constitute the jury.

Harbridge has cast her play superbly. The endlessly talented Best also plays Beiger’s manipulative mum, Edith, Amber McMahon is the journalist/narrator, Marco Chiappi the prosecutor who thought he had a conviction in the bag, Anthony Taufa the defence barrister and Maverick Newman is both the gun-supplying friend and keyboard-playing court stenographer.

Sofia Nolan is ideal as Beiger, although it’s a smallish role for most of the play, which brings me back to the point that perhaps there was more to mine here than the laughs. But do see it: it’s an infinitely better way to see the inside of Darlinghurst Courthouse than in handcuffs.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL
Antigone in the Amazon
Roslyn Packer Theatre, January 4
Until January 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

This, I promise you, is like nothing you have seen. An ancient Greek tragedy is fused with an ongoing global calamity in Brazil to create Antigone in the Amazon. Mythology and reality, it tells us, are one and the same. The civil war that backgrounds Sophocles’ timeless play finds its parallel in the 1996 police massacre of 19 Brazilians who were peacefully protesting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, which is being cleared at the rate of a football field every minute. About a fifth of it has now gone.

At times, the on-screen action is duplicated concurrently on stage.Credit: Stephen Wilson Barker

Directed by Milo Rau and devised by Rau and an ensemble comprising members of his Belgian-based NTGent company and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in the Amazon, including survivors of the massacre, it’s a dialogue on many levels. One is between 2,500 years ago and now; another between the stage and projected videos; another between process and outcome.

Initially, the four on-stage actors introduce themselves and the character(s) they play. During the performance they also speak of their experience living with their collaborators in the Amazon for a month, and how that changed them forever.

Sara De Bosschere, twice an Antigone in Sophocles’ version, now plays Creon, the dictator who condemns Antigone for burying her dead brother against his decree – a decree which, itself, broke all codes of decency. Frederico Araujo plays Antigone (and others) on stage, while Kay Sara does so on screen.

Arne De Tremerie is Creon’s son and Pablo Casella performs live music, is the chorus, and was choir master for the on-screen participants. The philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak speaks as a modern-day incarnation of the seer Tiresias on screen, now predicting not just Creon’s destruction, but the planet’s, unless greed is abated.

Milo Rau is firmly of the belief that theatre should strive to change the world.Credit: Stephen Wilson Barker

Sometimes the on-screen action is duplicated concurrently on stage, so Amazon and theatre become one, just as personal tragedy and communal tragedy become one. The reenactment of the massacre is confronting, as it was for those who participated. (Ex-president Bolsonaro joked about this event while in power, and called the protesters “terrorists”.)

It is a work that makes you question the purpose of art and assumptions about what constitutes “good” art. Certainly Rau is clear-cut in his imperative that theatre is nothing if it is not striving to change the world for the better: to stand with the Antigones who are activists in the cause of good and justice. Of course, we know from North Korea and Hitler’s Germany that it’s so easy for politically motivated art to cross the line to mere propaganda, and this show may well be seen like that by ranchers and miners from the vast swathes of flattened Amazon.

But the cause here is undeniably just and the points are powerfully made. If some of the acting fails to move us as much as it is intended to, the verbatim on-screen material amply compensates.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL
Cinderella
Opera Australia
Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera House
January 2
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★
A few children’s voices lightly peppered the conversation and music before and during Massenet’s Cinderella (Cendrillon), unshooshed and oblivious to operatic convention and pretension.

Opera Australia has chosen a condensed English-language version of Massenet’s belle epoch indulgence, which pushes the piece even further towards child-friendly pantomime than the composer’s brisk, neo-Rococo scoring. The emotional range is Disneyesque: Cinderella is pure, Prince Charming is ardent and everyone else is zany.

Ashlyn Tymms as Dorothee, Angela Hogan as Madame de la Haltiere and Jennifer Black as Noemie.Credit: Rhiannon Hopley

Barbara de Limburg’s set is like the inner pages of a storybook, with the text inscribed on the walls in monochrome. Director and designer Laurent Pelly’s costumes leap from the page in gaudy relief.

The downsides are that Massenet’s well-shaped but simple melodies are deprived of the charm and cadence of French vowels, and the main love-music, occurring during an interpolated episode in which a despairing Cinderella and Prince Charming meet in a forest as though in a dream, is cut entirely. This leaves the characters a little underdeveloped and makes the happy ending somewhat perfunctory.

Emily Edmonds inhabited the part of Cinderella with wide-eyed simplicity, and sang with even polish, though with more vibrato than was strictly necessary. Massenet created a “pants role” for Prince Charming to retain lightness and avoid domination, and mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer sang this with persuasive colour and all the sincerity required of a fairytale prince.

It was welcome to hear Emma Matthews return to Opera Australia for the demandingly high, virtuosic role of the Fairy Godmother which she navigated with deft aplomb. As Pandolfe, Richard Anderson was amiable and ineffectual as dads tend to be in such situations. Angela Hogan was vocally strong, and dramatically fearsome as the stepmother Madame de la Haltiere and Jennifer Black and Ashlyn Tymms created an aptly peevish and clueless pair of stepsisters.

Shane Lowrencev was an imperious King while Iain Henderson, Alexander Hargreaves and Nathan Lay supported the court with obsequious prissiness. The Opera Australia Chorus punctuated the score with brilliant blazes of sound as servants, fops and shocks, and the parade of hopefuls for the slipper brought forth a series of retro-stereotypes apparently unvanquished by wokeness.

Conductor Evan Rogister maintained steady coordination between stage and pit, though some of the rapid detail from the Opera Australia Orchestra was a little approximate at times. It was all profoundly unserious, but the hilarity and absurdity were well-received and, to accommodate the young and the old, was completed before midnight with a couple of hours to spare.

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SYDNEY FESTIVAL
As You Like it or the Land Acknowledgement
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 4
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

How wickedly satisfying it must be for Cliff Cardinal at times, looking out onto his audience. They must stand out – those expectant eggy faces that turn even paler upon realising this “provocative take on Shakespeare’s As You Like it” involves no trace of Anglo culture’s darling (except in prankster spirit).

Cliff Cardinal in As You Like it, or the Land Acknowledgment.Credit: Dahlia Katz

Sans Rosalind, sans forest romance, sans famous monologues, this no-frills one-man Sydney Festival show from Canada is instead a scorching satire of the performativity of political correctness, and the hypocrisy of rote and empty rituals of reconciliation. In other words, the land acknowledgement that will ostensibly precede the show proper is the show (im)proper – a brazen direct-to-audience performance blending stand-up with polemic, personal story with intergenerational rage, social commentary with mischief.

Presented by Crow’s Theatre, a version of this award-winning show premiered in Toronto in 2021 – the same year hundreds of Indigenous children’s bodies were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of Canada’s residential schools. Cardinal, of Cree and Lakota heritage, was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and raised between Los Angeles and Toronto.

As with our colonial nation, his country has been doing land acknowledgments for decades, evidently opening anything from “Swift concerts to Zoom meetings”. The practice began in the ’70s as a dream of protest whispered around dinner tables; Cardinal now jeers at it as little more than a self-deluding, patronising, ad nauseam parade of white leftist sloganeering.

As with his previous Sydney Festival show Huff in 2017, Cardinal takes no prisoners and holds nothing sacred. His stage style is unique: face stretched into an unnatural grin, eyes glittering between comic wit and rightful anger, he frets the proscenium of the Drama Theatre, the red curtain behind him ironically never rising. Mockery and mugging are the central spices of his delivery, paired with his own kind of oddball physical comedy. One of his defence mechanisms against colonial misappropriation, for example, turns his “I don’t care” shrug into a ninja pose.

Cardinal’s bitter relish and most productive artistic skill is to call bullshit on etiquette and bring in rare honesty through unapologetic, humour-laced discomfort. Over 80-odd minutes, with slyness and scorn, he variously takes aim at support for minorities, cultural genocide, racial stereotypes, and the grotesque neediness of settlers to make the people they’ve oppressed (historically or otherwise) in turn make them feel both superior and without sin. Even the festival and its sponsors aren’t spared.

One thing survives the tide of excoriating disdain: family. This includes his own huge extended family, in particular the women who inspire him; as well as his ancestors’ concept of humanity as family. Forget the feel-goods, he says, let’s be family.

Staged a little over a year after most Australians denied First Nations people a Voice to Parliament, As You Like It or the Land Acknowledgement is far more relevant to Sydney audiences over one of Shakespeare’s relatively frivolous works.

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The Roots
Hordern Pavilion, January 2
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★½

Even the most energetic of bands, who come bursting out the gate at a gig with a flurry of songs, need a breather from playing within the first 30 minutes. Philadelphia hip-hop outfit The Roots, however, are built different: the 10 members on stage keep energy levels peaking for a full hour before taking the briefest break, which is enough to sustain their astonishing stamina for another hour after that.

The Roots perform music as if it’s a continuous DJ mix, blending selections from their catalogue with tracks that are pivotal to hip-hop’s foundation: Apache by Incredible Bongo Band, Funky Drummer by James Brown and Main Source’s Looking at the Front Door are among the many covers.

Tariq ‘Black Thought’ Trotter is one of the greatest rappers yet.Credit: Richard Clifford

Anyone hoping to see The Roots, led by MC Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, strictly cycle through faithful renditions of the band’s songs are likely to leave disappointed. Their “History of Hip-Hop Jukebox” approach makes sense though: most of The Roots’ songs are best experienced as part of the intricately thought-out and sequenced albums from which they hail, so combining their best tracks with party jams is an easy win.

Most would now recognise The Roots as Jimmy Fallon’s house band on The Tonight Show. In a live setting, they send a powerful reminder of their greatest strengths: they’re an incredible live band that can play anything, and they have one of the great rappers in the form of Black Thought, whose breath control while firing off rapid-fire rhymes is something to behold.

Despite the multitude of band members running around the stage, everyone gets a moment to shine, including guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas, who sings Erykah Badu’s parts on Roots classic You Got Me, and Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr” Bryson, who unexpectedly rocks the crowd with a sousaphone solo.

It’s a show that feels like both a sprint and a marathon, an ADHD-friendly feast for music lovers that throws in The Roots’ The Seed (2.0), Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up and Kool G Rap and DJ Polo’s Men at Work into one dizzying, dynamic climax.

It’s good to know they’re collecting that major TV network pay, but tonight is definitive proof the live arena is where The Roots masterfully and truly belong.

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